The we-can’t-go-on-like-this hour arrived the day before an explosive evening: Earle Dana again the catalyst. Every few weeks Earle found some excuse to gather them around him. He was an expansive host; there was always a vacuous large-breasted blonde or redhead on his arm-sometimes Mackenzie suspected Earle hired them- and the soirees provided fuel for the next month’s cruel laughter, so they always went.
It had been nearly a year by then. Mackenzie never learned what triggered things but it all blew apart at that last party of Earle’s.
He’d seen Jay and Shirley through a gap in the crowd. Hissing at each other. Their bodies twang-taut, every tendon standing out, faces livid. It wasn’t one of their normal spats. Those came and went with metronomic regularity; they were loud and only mock-violent and they passed quickly. This was not anger; this was hate.
Audrey beside him saw the direction and alarm of Mackenzie’s glance. She looked that way; moved closer and gripped his arm. “What on earth?”
People around the Painters were backing away as if from something that frothed with rabies.
Jay spat something at Shirley-a sibilant awful whisper. She rocked back on her heels, went stone-silent and still. Abruptly she wheeled. Her little fists rose and fell with inarticulate rage. She stormed toward the door.
Mackenzie was right in her path.
She touched his hand. “I’m sorry. I blew it. He just got me so mad.… Forgive me.” Then she was gone. The door slammed with a shuddering crash.
And Jay Painter was stalking toward Mackenzie with murderous eyes.
Audrey clutched at his arm. “Sam-”
He tried to get her out of there but all the while Jay was railing at him with a “Keep me away from him I’ll kill him” performance and by the time Mackenzie got Audrey out of the place she’d heard more than enough to fit things together and she’d jumped to the conclusion that was natural if not correct.
She refused to hear his protestation. She didn’t talk to him at all. She locked herself in the bedroom.
The next afternoon when he came home she was slumped in the car inside the closed garage. The engine was still running. She’d been dead for several hours.
A week later Mackenzie left the army and put his M.D. and his psychiatric shingle away in storage. Nothing had forewarned him that Audrey might be that close to the ultimate breakdown. When he looked back he could count off all the classic symptoms as they’d appeared one by one-the shock of his presumed physical betrayal had been only the trigger, not the cause-but the horrible fact was that he hadn’t seen any of it coming.
If I’d been any kind of a shrink at all I’d have been able to head it off.
He was forced to recognize himself as a third-rate shaman, incompetent psychiatrist. If there’d been any real talent he wouldn’t have stayed protectively in the army. The facts had always been there; only the insights had been lacking. And a psychiatrist without insights was like a toxic agent turned loose in a water supply: incalculable the damage it could do.
After a while he realized that sort of thinking was extreme-guilty overreaction-but he never had the impulse to go back to the profession. And until now he’d never had further contact with any of them. They’d had key roles in the disintegration of his life, the destruction of Audrey’s: they were the instruments of his guilt.
And clearly they hated him. Earle rankled still from the things Mackenzie had shouted at him when Earle innocently phoned to offer condolences. Shirley couldn’t help hating him for what she’d done to herself: he’d been her willing accomplice. Jay owned the cuckold’s rage. Duggai-he was the ultimate victim.
In time he had found something new to justify his existence. A love of the forest. He’d been happy. But now Calvin Duggai and the past had returned to deform the present.
He rubbed his forehead fiercely as if that could expunge his memories. He watched the line of sun-shadow move across the north wall of the pit. Its angle grew flatter but when he lifted his head to scent the air he discerned no reduction yet in its stifling heat. He sagged back into the grave to wait it out.
During the morning at intervals he’d heard Jay and Shirley calling across the island between their trenches but since the descent of the day’s heat he hadn’t heard any more of that.
It took no imagination to chart their symptoms; Mackenzie shared them. The tongue had begun to swell: it cleaved to the flesh of his mouth. His eyes had gone dry and it was painful to open them, even to slits. His lips were cracked. His belly had begun to knot. Soon he suspected there would be cramps. Lying still he could feel the solemn stubborn thud of a pulse in his ears: it made a rhythm against the high-frequency whistle there. His head ached.
All that would get worse. But it would be a while before it became incapacitating.
A buzzard drifted overhead, circling lower for a better look; it cruised in and out of the frame of his vision. Finally it skimmed so low over his trench that he felt the breeze of its passage. He sat up. The blood rushed from his head and he felt consciousness flood away; he tightened the band of his stomach muscles against it and through the gray haze on his vision watched the buzzard flap away, startled by his movement. It planed along the flats until it caught an up-draft; he watched it swing aloft. For the next half hour it hovered in vast lazy circles far overhead. After a while several others joined it.
The color of the sky began to change. He drowsed fitfully, rousing himself at intervals to have a look at the buzzards; if they came low again he’d throw something at them to warn them off. He didn’t want to be awakened by a beak drilling into his eye.
It was too easy to envy the buzzards their freedom. With their cambered wings they could slide effortlessly-a hundred miles in a few hours if they wished-to water or to a safe nest.
It made him think of Calvin Duggai. Somewhere on the surrounding heights Duggai was sure to be camped. Every now and then he’d be taking out his field glasses to find out how his victims were getting along.
He went half asleep and didn’t realize it until a sound startled him and he split his eyes open and saw Jay Painter’s silhouette against the sky foreshortened by perspective.
Jay didn’t speak at once. Mackenzie got up slowly, giving the circulation time to adjust. He stood in the hip- deep hole and scanned the desert. The sun, not nearly so strong now, slanted down from a flat angle near the horizon. Dust devils funneled erratically along the flats some distance away, a yellow wheeling of sand and twigs and leaves.
The buzzards were no longer in the sky. Perhaps Jay’s perambulation had discouraged them.
“What now?” Jay’s voice was painfully hoarse.
Mackenzie picked up the brass knives. “We cut open a cactus.”
11
Jay and Shirley watched his work with dubious expectation, reserving hope. Resentment deformed their features.
The barrel cactus had heavy fishhook spines and he had to cut them out one by one with the clumsy short- bladed tool. He heard Jay’s mutter: “Come on, come
He turned, proffering. Shirley took the handful of moist dark substance from him like an addict snatching an overdue fix.
Mackenzie could have let them dig for themselves but by bestowing water upon them with his hands he maintained his fragile leadership. He withheld his thirst; he drank last-because anarchy would kill them faster than anything else. The one-eyed man in the kingdom of the blind: fuehrer of the dung heap.
Jay shoveled the stuff out of his cupped hands: lips peeled back in a simian grimace, jaws working.
“God,” Shirley croaked. “It’s horrible.”
“It’s wet.” Mackenzie cut out a section of pulp and sucked on it. His throat and tongue absorbed the bitter liquid greedily. The spasmodic constrictions of his swallowings were ferocious and painful. And all for a few drops of moisture the taste of which was as tart as the smell of new-mown grass.
He scooped out more of the plant’s innards. “Take it to Earle.” Jay held his hands out and looked at it greedily: a dark soggy fibrous substance as unappetizing as compost. Mackenzie swung away.
